Ed Snyder began this blog in order to share his decade-long experience with all things cemeterial. As a photographer specializing in images of cemetery statuary, I've run into some interesting people, had some unexplainable experiences, and had a lot of fun.

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Scary Cemetery Stories

October is always a good time to write scary stories. Truth
is, with all the time I spend in cemeteries, I don’t have many scary
experiences. Probably the scariest one of all was last weekend when a thousand-pound
headstone fell on someone. She got away with just a broken ankle. Hell,
that thing would have crushed her if she had not jumped far enough out of the
way. As she walked around it, she felt a vibration, and down it came.

Many people think of scary stories when they think of
cemeteries, mainly because that is what the media feeds us. Working in cemeteries,
volunteering to help restore them, raising money to keep them going – these
activities bring you back to the reality that a cemetery is just a piece of
land. Or is it?

Every once in a while, I hear a scary cemetery story, told by some seemingly sane person,
even a close friend. As a result, it brings me
right back to wonder about the whole idea!It was a nun they
say invented barbed wire, Henry James tells us in his novel, Ulysses.

So I do hear my share of scary stories, and I thought I’d
share a few with you. Here’s one: I was part of a photography workshop in a
cemetery recently and a gentleman in his sixties told me that when he and his
sister were young, maybe four and five years old, their nanny would sometimes
dress the two children in white “Holy Communion” type outfits and lead them to
the cemetery next door. This was in the mid-1950s. The nanny would have him and his
sister lie down on graves “like little angels” and take pictures of them! Wait!
It gets better! He STILL has the pictures!

Here’s another one: It’s not unusual to find dolls and toys
propped up against a child’s headstone. Sad, surely. But this toy story has an
odd twist. In a Philadelphia cemetery stands a large granite monument with a
few names inscribed on it. You wouldn’t even look twice, it looks so average. I
was walking past it with a friend of mine who said, “There’s the famous Currie
monument.” I asked what she meant. She said a psychic had been through the
cemetery and stopped at this monument, saying she sensed a “protector.”
Supposedly the spirits of children surrounded this man’s grave. The reason? “He
protects them from all the evil in this place.” She told me people put toys
behind the monument for the children.I
looked behind it and saw a toy truck and a doll.

Graveyard dolls

Speaking of dolls, they themselves are creepy enough, but
finding one in a cemetery just adds to their creepiness. I’ve found voodoo
dolls and this thing you see here, sort of a mammy doll (also at the top of this article) with a small pillow
sewn to her back. The dolls that a friend of mine found once, though, were more
disturbing. Knowing a particular cemetery quite well, he noticed something
sticking up out of the ground in front of a headstone.

He went to investigate,
and found a freshly covered hole, with a doll’s feet sticking out of the
ground! He dug around it a bit and was shocked to find two naked Barbies tied
together, facing each other, with shards of broken glass between them! Most
likely some voodoo or Santeria spell. (Based on a five minute search of the Internet, here’s
my analysis: a spell to break lovers apart. Perhaps some interloper trying
to separate a couple of lesboterians? Or maybe worse.)

I leave you with yet another doll story, creepy, yet funny in its own way. A woman I know had spent her childhood living near a cemetery. She and her friends learned to ride their bikes there, played there, walked through it to get to school. One of their pastimes was to go into the cemetery at night and hang their Barbies from the tree behind the old crematory, "just to see if they would still be there in the morning." They always were.